André Simon Awards: Flawless

In the final extract from this year’s shortlisted drinks books in the André Simon Awards, Jamie Goode argues the notion that not all wine faults are necessarily complete negatives.

Perfection versus imperfection: On the nature of beauty

I want to introduce a concept that I think is really helpful for understanding wine faults, and for grasping the notion that some flavour chemicals can be both faulty and positive, depending on the concentration and the context. This is the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. Put in simple terms, it is the idea that flaws can bring out beauty, or that flaws are in fact part of beauty. In contrast to the Western aesthetic of striving for a beauty that lies in the attainment (or near attainment) of perfection, wabi- sabi suggests that beauty is transient, incomplete, and imperfect. Features that are not beautiful in and of themselves can contribute to beauty, and the wabi-sabi aesthetic—in many ways a more satisfying and richer one—includes characteristics such as asymmetry, irregularity, simplicity, economy, modesty, and austerity. The idea of applying wabi-sabi to wine faults came from my discussions with Sam Harrop, who should get the credit.

Wine consultant Ken Ohashi introduced Sam and me to a Japanese term that translates as “silence like a drop of water.” Imagine you are sitting by a pool in a zen garden. It is as silent and tranquil as you can get. But it’s the sound of water drops that shows you how silent it is—without this subtle noise, you wouldn’t have recognised and appreciated the silence. Another example is the gentle ticking of a mechanical clock in an other- wise silent room: it seems to emphasise the quietness. Ohashi gives the example of a red wine that he tried, with some match- stick and pepper reductive characters. He describes these as the “minerality” of the wine, without which he thinks it would have tasted simple and even watery. But the presence of these traces of what could be called a wine fault—reduction—allowed him to see the purity of the wine. In the absence of the reduction, he wouldn’t have recognised the purity.

Perfumers are familiar with the idea that smells that are highly aversive on their own can be useful in creating a beautiful perfume. One of the most expensive ingredients in perfume is ambergris, which is taken from what is the whale equivalent of a cat’s fur ball (it is produced in the digestive system of sperm whales). This is actually quite disgusting, and smelled alone it would be repellent. But in a mix of odours, it provides interest and complements other, more immediately attractive smells while acting as a fixer, helping the aromas of the perfume persist. Another example is the aroma of jasmine. It contains small amounts of indole, which on its own would be an aversive smell. If people smell synthetic jasmine (which doesn’t have indole) and the real thing (which does), often they can’t tell them apart. But if they are pressed to decide which they prefer, they frequently opt for the real thing: the trace of the normally aversive indole adds something that people like to the smell of jasmine.

In a similar vein, let’s consider music. What makes it beautiful? Music follows mathematical order, but not perfectly—that would be very boring. In a study published in a leading scientific journal, Nature Neuroscience,1 the authors showed that music causes the release of the reward chemical dopamine in the brain, as do other pleasurable stimuli like food, drugs, and sex. They also showed that this dopamine release occurs both at peak emotional moments in the music—the “good bits,” such as a melodic hook or chorus—and in anticipation of those good bits. The authors state:

The anticipatory phase, set off by temporal cues signalling that a potentially pleasurable auditory sequence is coming, can trigger expectations of euphoric emotional states and create a sense of wanting and reward prediction. This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten the motivation for completion.

Good composers and songwriters leave us unfulfilled. They tease us, showing us briefly the notes or chord that we want to hear and then avoiding it until the main hook or chorus. They build up expectation, and may even seek to diffuse the expectation by putting in unexpected notes or chords. In a sense, they create something more beautiful by avoiding the obvious expression of what we would classify as beauty. And the “flaws” or “deviations” highlight the beauty when it is finally revealed. Or perhaps they go deeper: the flaws and deviations may well be part of the beauty.

We find the same dynamic in the arena of flavour. Tasted alone, salt is not pleasant. It’s aversive. But at the appropriate level it adds life to food, creating a tension. The same goes for lemon juice: alone it is too acidic to be pleasurable for most people, but it creates a needed tension in some dishes. Sweetness alone is cloying; counter it with adequate acidity and it’s lovely.

Our attraction to faces is a further example of the complex nature of beauty. There are certain rules of facial attractiveness in humans, and the evidence suggests they are hardwired. For example, judgments of facial beauty are cross-culturally consistent among adults and children, and young babies will look longer at attractive faces than at less attractive ones. It’s not an absolute property; it’s just that there are guidelines governing what sort of faces people find desirable, and evolutionary explanations for why this might be so. Certainly, a beautiful face is something we find very compelling. Yet attempts by scientists to produce the “perfect” one result in a composite face that, while certainly striking and attractive, looks slightly bland and less attractive than you’d expect. It’s the presence of subtle flaws that brings out the real beauty. We love faces with a bit of character, not a total absence of even the smallest flaws. Most of all, though, we are attracted to the faces of those we know and like.

How does this relate to wine? I will argue that the most attractive, compelling wines are those that have elements of their character that, if they were in a different context or present at higher levels, might be considered faulty. It all depends on the wine, the context, and the consumer. When is volatile acidity too high? When is greenness good and when is it too bad? When are tannins too grippy and firm? When are earthy, spicy characters off-putting? When is savouriness or gaminess too prominent? When is new oak too obtrusive? When does a wine pass from mature to senescent? Many of these characters are present to a degree in some of the world’s greatest wines. These are the sorts of questions I will address in subsequent chapters.

Reprinted with permission from ‘Flawless: Understanding Faults in Wine’ by Jamie Goode, copyright © 2018. Published by University of California Press

the drinks business and the André Simon Awards will also be offering readers the chance to win a copy of each of the shortlisted books over the coming weeks. Stay tuned to our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for further details.